DROPBOX: We'll Turn Your Files Over To The Government If They Ask Us To

This is nothing groundbreaking, but Dropbox has updated its security Terms of
Service to say that if the government asks, they will have to
decrpyt user's files and turn them over.

That's standard practice for any online storage service from
Gmail to Amazon, and shouldn't affect the average user
unless they're doing something wrong.

The updated passage reads:

As set forth in our privacy policy, and in compliance with United
States law, Dropbox cooperates with United States law enforcement
when it receives valid legal process, which may require Dropbox
to provide the contents of your private Dropbox. In these cases,
Dropbox will remove Dropbox’s encryption from the files before
providing them to law enforcement.

It's always important to read a site's Terms of Service before
signing on, and take care what you store on sites like Dropbox.
Any files that violate copyright couldbe removed.

Again, this won't affect most users, so don't sweat it. If you
want to read Drobox's full Terms of Service, click here.

UPDATE: Like we said, this is nothing to worry
about, but Dropbox reached out to us with a statement to clarify
the change in its Terms of Service:

In our help article we state that
Dropbox employees aren't able to access user files. This is not
an intentionally misleading statement -- it is enforced by
technical access controls on our backend storage infrastructure
as well as strict policy prohibitions. The contents of a file
will never be accessed by a Dropbox employee without the user's
permission. We can see, however, why people may have
misinterpreted "Dropbox employees aren't able to access user
files" as a statement about how Dropbox uses encryption, so we
will change this article to use the clearer "Dropbox employees
are prohibited from accessing user files."

Regarding our Terms of
Service:

Like all U.S. companies, Dropbox
must follow U.S. law. Our Terms of Service have always stated
that Dropbox must comply with law enforcement officials, but as
the popularity of Dropbox has grown rapidly, we've gotten an
increasing number of questions from users about how we do this.
The TOS update was merely a clarification for users, not a policy
update -- we will fight vigorously for user privacy. It is also
worth noting that all companies that store user data (Google,
Amazon, etc.) are not above the law and must comply with court
orders and have similar statements in their respective terms of
service.